


All Shades, No Filter

by Aurora Cee (SC182)



Category: Fast & Furious (2009), Fast and the Furious Series, The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Character of Color, Color Blindness, F/M, Families of Choice, First Time, Love at First Sight, M/M, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 13:56:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3731377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SC182/pseuds/Aurora%20Cee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...he’ll find that person that will bring his world into a new light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Shades, No Filter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Goddesstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goddesstar/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters herein. The main characters as well as any supporting characters are the property of their creators and Universal Pictures. Any deviation (or deviant behavior) from the originals, however, is mine.
> 
> A/N:Written prior to Furious 7, this is another take on why Brian and Dom and always BrianandDom. Thanks for reading and please comment.
> 
> For Goddesstar, thanks for always carrying the B/D flame.

Dom lives his life a quarter mile at a time. When he’s behind a wheel, his life glides into oscillating shades of gray, clicking and sliding seamlessly like well-oiled pistons waiting to burst through a final wall of speed. He’s free and determined yet blind and hollow to the thing that conquers the gray.

He’s never really minded the blurring wash of gray when faced with the stark alternative of black and white landscapes of the store, the garage, and Lompoc. So he navigates his life—the streets of Echo Park to the dusty flats of the desert and its sinuous highways—fast enough to give him hope that if he drives long enough—hard enough, he’ll find that person that will bring his world into a new light.

Gray is damn complicated; Dom keeps his head down in a half-ass fashion, working at the store and the garage but still gains new life between the intersections and long blocks of not-so empty streets and highways that he can never honestly talk to Mia about.

So he starts another half-assed day, handling business in the back, a tingling rising behind his eyes, and barely notices the “Tuna on white. No crusts,” until Vince is barking and Mia is yelling, giving Dom a new direction.

Spilner comes into Dom’s life with a breezy attitude that carries the strength of a tornado in his voice and knowledge of curvaceous roads and swells in his step. Harry’s new guy says earnestly, “He was in my face,” regarding Vince who stalks at Dom’s back like a cougar ready to pounce.

Dom may snap back, “Now, I’m in your face,” when he stands between them, but he thinks: _Blue—his eyes are blue_. Somehow he knows Spilner’s eyes are blue and the scene around them begins to melt away and blur into lines that for once just ain’t black and white.

He watches Spilner prowl off angrily to the truck— _red_ —to the red truck, still spitting that “this is bullshit” and Dom gets _it_.

And then comes the instinctual stomach drop like falling down an elevator shaft but slower of _oh shit_.

* * *

Spilner isn’t a fluke. Of course he’s not because he must see in color, too, just the way that Dom does. He comes back for the race; just rolls through to find a point and waits for attention and soaks it up.

Spilner may look at the crowd, though his smile is all for Dom and there’s almost too much color for Dom to take. Yellow—no, blond: the color of his hair. His eyes blue but a different shade than Dom imagined. Teeth white and gleaming. Car green like crispy candy apples on the boardwalk.

Just looking at Spilner sparks fire through his memories that burns away the sepia tones, leaving only ashes of color to fill in the spaces left behind.

* * *

Dom almost feels like he owes Tran and his locomofo cousin a thank you. Almost, he concedes as he and Brian—“I almost had you”—Spilner hoof it back to Echo Park from the ass-end of the Chinatown.

The burning carcass of the Eclipse spills light—yellow, yellow, yellow—across sleeping cars and buildings slumbering under the weight of political disinterest and financial abandonment. If anyone heard the shots, they ain’t calling no uniforms tonight. Just turn away from the windows and fade back into the blend of grays that made the shades of this world.

Dom drifts away from the fire, only to be reeled in by the blue arc of the buster’s gaze.

“Is hangin’ around you always like that?” Spilner asks as they come to the mutual silent decision to flag a taxi.

Dom’s got an idea of where this is going but the idea of keeping Spilner pacing him for just a while longer allows him to shift left and feint ignorance. “Always what?” Dom shifts his feet into a settled stance, loose and ready, though his eyes dance restlessly, absorbed in the snapping fill and appearance of orange streetlights; one filling after another hugging the edge of the street.

Brian snickers for a quick beat of two and ducks his head, eyes shifting to the ground. “Always so…so explosive.” He says deliberately, and smiling broadly through his cheese. “Like just shy of atomic level.”

Chuckling just a little, Dom shrugs lightly, making his leather jacket groan. “I see what you did there.”

“Yeah?”

“Most definitely.” Dom looks to the hill, “Alright story time, Spilner. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not looking for the words _once upon a time_.” Dom’s got a story brewing in his head, a start at least but the end is totally open.

The pride pouring through the open grin of the buster is so sure and contagious. Dom knows all about cons and bullshit, and there just ain’t a whiff of it coming off Mr. Surfside Buster. “First thing, I really like tuna with no crust. Two, I really did almost have you, bro.”

The entire cab ride back Dom becomes drunk on the schizophrenic dance of red, yellow, and green traffic lights intercut by the blue and white flickers of Spilner’s attention.

* * *

The ride to the house ends all too soon, leaving Dom with the phantom pain of missed conversation as soon as the front door to the house opens and he’s swallowed up by a sea of people and the roaring tides of music pumping through the speakers and out into the walls.

There’s Vince, then there’s Letty; each cutting him off from _Brian_ —no longer kept at a distance as Spilner—like a pair of whirling human rip tides.

When the edges of his vision start to shake and blur, Dom can’t narrow it down to the catalyst but allows himself to fall headlong into the feeling.

He rounds on Vince. “The buster kept me out of handcuffs!” Let’s the boom of his voice burst through the party bubble and settle back to normal. He sees these people, his people, for the first time in full color. A few faces break through the color wave like small troughs in shallow currents. But he keeps coming back to Brian.

Stirs up shit just for the sake of soothing his own simmering anger by snatching up Vince’s beer and offering it to Brian without blinking. Brian accepts the beer with a silent, reverbing _fuck you_ as he wipes off the mouth and drinks.

Brian is a beacon in a sea of shadowed bodies, sticking out like a jagged hook that Dom feels compelled to brush against. Injuries be damned.

There’s no time to finish what they started in the cab. Not when Letty arrives and looks at Dom expectantly. He gives Brian another look, already so significant, and feels his anger deflate as he’s mentally urged to keep it cool and follow the flow.

So Dom takes Letty’s hand and follows her up the stairs, his body following her step for step; his eyes following Brian until he disappears. Each kiss is a swan song as her body rolls beneath his in a wave of oscillating gray. He pushes against the growing chasm of defeat—the feeling like the coming of fall and winter conquering over eternal summer, freezing everything that’s he ever felt for her. Just turning it cold and brittle.

But Dom does not lose. Ever. Dom sucks her nipples to points, his surges his fingers forward, judders his hips hard and around, trying to cover every inch of her though he loses ground, loses the warm feelings for her with each breath. He fights for her. He tries for her.

She comes.

He comes.

And he looks at her in the same shades of gray in which he’s always seen her and feels empty as she gives him that open smile that carries the full weight of her heart.

The color blue flashes in his mind, nowhere in sight and Dom closes his eyes and presses his forehead against the rapid rise and fall of her belly. Squeezing hard against the wall that shakes and threatens to crumble each time he remembers colors, and then he thinks blue as hot splashes escape the corners of his eyes, and rubs the drops into her skin mingling with the sweat off his brow.

Blue, he thinks, is the color of loss.

The color of new beginnings.

Blue is the color of endings.

In that moment, arms folded over Letty and her arms twining over his back: Dom knows loss. He kisses her belly again and presses her closer.

He prepares to say goodbye.

* * *

Brian comes to the garage with the burnout hull of a car and knowing smile. “I owe you a ten second car,” he beams with the indescribable lights of excitement coloring his face.

Compelled by Brian’s grin and the sunshine coloring him in, “Yeah, a ten second car. Not a ten minute car.”

Brian parries easily with open arms that match his grin. “You said it didn’t matter if it was by an inch or a mile: winning’s winning, man.”

Dom laughs, because he’s never been quoted quite like this. Brian does this thing of making a show of the Eclipse’s ugly façade like he’s the male version of Vanna White. It cracks up everyone’s shit but Vince, which is kind of expected. It’s a marvel that Brian can make the varying scale of charred black and gray beautiful.

So drinking up the colors of the moment, growing drunker than any series of Coronas could ever make him is what Dom does.

* * *

Weeks later there’s still no fighting what co-mingled symptoms of Brian hanging around and the rising intensity of color filling Dom’s worldview mean, he brings Brian into his past. He introduces the gleaming black beast that haunts his dreams and quiet moments. He bleeds out the story of his father and his own mistakes, painting the silent space between him and Brian in all shades of red until Brian stops him with a single question.

“You ever try to drive it?”

The Charger is more animal than machine, and drives just as much as gets driven. Dom’s not sure if he’ll ever be ready. “Someday maybe or…not. The car scares the shit outta me. And I may have been called dumb, but I’m not stuck on stupid.”

It’s Brian’s simple silent acceptance that forces Dom to finally reach out.

Brian is reluctant to touch, almost skittish, but when they do, it’s right. Just right.

He feels Brian under his skin without his hands being on him. He knows Brian’s hiding something. Feels the mountain-sized heap of want and yearning that buzzes through him when he’s around Dom or when he’s around the team as family. Let him have his secrets, because Dom will never be a completely open book. As long Dom continues to see sparks as long as Brian is around, then he’ll let himself be selectively blind.

Up close in the hot air of the garage, they get to inspect each other without interruption. Far too alike where it matters most and only superficially different in physical specs—tall and lean versus broad and heavy when chest to chest. Dom holds up Brian’s hands and admires the differences between their skin, the shallow contrast between the wet summer sand tone of his hands and wrists wrapped around the candy cream peach tone of Brian’s long tapered fingers.

He peels off Brian’s shirts and draws his fingers over the natural lines of his skin, fingers skimming sections slow and carefully as if reading Brian’s entire life beneath the coarse furrows of his fingertips.

He feels Brian’s panic in his veins and the smallest speck of fear that’s quickly swept away like dust on a porch. Dom smiles---totally getting that stab of discomfort: He’d panic too if his middle name was Earl.

Dom shifts and lifts, catching Brian off-guard but ready for more, now that he’s been propped up on the gleaming black chassis of the Charger. Stepping inside the wide line between Brian’s legs, Dom anchors Brian to the edge of the car while Brian holds the hem on his shirt and reels him in with a sky blue spell until eye to eye, breath shared, brown and blue blur.

When they kiss, there’s only an explosion of color, blooming with the ease of spring flowers. Just a haze of the world dimming between one blink and slide of lips and then the chaotic reveal of full color marked by the interruption to breathe.

There’s more, of course. Kissing that downshifts to steady pacing, because they have all the evidence to know that this is real. They’ll be solid and sure, already designed for each other, having found each other at a literal crossroads.

For once, Dom wants to go slow. Wants to continue rocking his hips up against Brian’s hardness. Wants to kiss until the air grows too hot to continue, making them feel twice as breathless. Wants to tattoo his prints on Brian’s body as a record for where he’s been and has yet to go. Wants Brian’s hands to remain fearless as they mold Dom’s body into the right position for optimal exploration.

There’s nothing more beautiful than the colors of the world in this moment.

He always focuses on Brian when he talks or when they talk; always stares into Brian’s eyes as the edges of the world fill with slowly creeping color until Brian no longer burns as brightly—like a flare pitched into a backdrop of infinite shades of gray.

No matter the origin of the story of how paired souls bring each other out of darkness and into a world of new light; Dom knows that this fire between them is only the beginning.

* * *

Dom wishes for the shades of gray when Brian confesses to being a cop. He wishes he didn’t know how quickly fresh blood goes dark against the air. First Vinces, then Jesse’s.

There are too many colors at the end:

Red is his family’s blood.

Blue is the color of the sky as Brian sails past him to leap on the semi.

Black is the road where he leaves his father’s beast of burden.

Orange is the Supra as it silently waits for him to escape.

Gray is the storminess in Brian’s eyes as Dom drives away.

  
**

Life goes on with colors on mute, lacking that high definition touch.

* * *

Years later after countless trials, Dom and Brian meet again. Before they make eyes on each other, there’s a heightened resolution to the world that casts each moment in prismatic clarity.

Sitting at the line ready to go, Brian says, “A lot has changed.”

Dom smirks as he takes in the constellation of lights that make up L.A. in the distance and the mosaic of colors making this meet. “Not all things, Brian.” Brian is composed of the same colors and Dom sees his own reflected in Brian’s gaze.

No matter the result of this quarter mile or beyond, there are no more shadows.

The flag drops.

The world grows sharp again like razor wire and together they blow right through it. This is a world made just for them, too bright to ever fade.


End file.
